The Next Strait of Hormuz is 240,000 Miles Above

I just finished reading Tim Marshall’s The Future of Geography. My bachelor’s degree at UNC was in Military History. So I devoured Clausewitz, Jomini and Corbett. But applying their laws and maxims to the vast volumes, and latencies in the contested space environment is a new challenge I am contemplating with several partners. The lessons from all of the dusty tomes before WWI describe terrain and logistics. Terrain has always been a huge factor in who wins in any conflict. Mountains, rivers, and narrow straits have shaped every empire on this planet, and Marshall’s point in The Future of Geography is that the same logic is about to shape the volume of space between the Earth and the Moon. That volume has a name, cislunar space, and it has terrain of its own that presents a whole host of new challenges.

Screen shot from the Ultisim/Entarian cislunar digital twin model showing all starlink satellites, their orbits and comm links with ground stations as they pass.

Cislunar terrain is composed of gravity and energy. The Earth’s gravity well is a mountain you climb once and pay for in a mountain of treasure. After that, the terrain flattens out, and the cost of moving anywhere is measured in delta-v, the change in velocity a spacecraft must buy with propellant. A few places in that map are cheap to reach and cheap to hold. Those places are…